


The Consultation

by themerrygentleman



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Backstory, Canon Autistic Character, Character Study, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 10:26:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4218159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themerrygentleman/pseuds/themerrygentleman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darryl McAllister will gladly stare down storms and volcanoes in the practice of his Art, but knowing what to say to the people he works with....that can be a challenge. A wizard alone no longer, he turns to local Seniors Tom Swale and Carl Romeo for advice on friendships, partnerships, and everything in between, and learns the story of how the two met and started working together</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Consultation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [222Ravens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/gifts).



> It should be noted that this story takes place during the events of "Wizard's Holiday."

A wave crashed against the rocks, sending a tower of spray clawing its way worryingly high up towards the iron-colored clouds. Darryl McAllister, eleven-year-old wizard, couldn’t keep from shivering as he looked on. Although the wizardly ‘bubble’ that currently surrounded him was shielding him from the worst of the weather, the wave had still been far too close for comfort, and unless the intervention team did its work quickly, there would be many more like it on the way soon.

Although the others were elsewhere in the growing gale, he could feel them somewhere at the edges of his consciousness, using one of the subtle additional senses that wizardry granted. And he could sense the copy of himself—“Darryl B,” the team had called the duplicate in their plans—stationed on an island a few miles out to sea, keeping an eye on the approaching storm from another angle. If he concentrated, he could perceive another set of senses overlaid on his own, a glimpse of pine trees and ocean waves far from where he was currently standing.

_Okay, Darryl,_ a voice said in his mind—Madison, the team’s unofficial leader. _Claire and Alan have finished laying down the superstructure. You can start adding energy to nodes A and C of the spell now._

_Got it,_ Darryl replied, and stepped forward, the wind lashing at his yellow raincoat. He scanned the nondescript gray pebbles that made up the beach until the shimmering lines of the spell diagram caught his eye.

He’d long since prepared all of the spells he’d need for his part in the intervention, so he only needed one syllable of the Speech apiece to complete them and turn them loose. An instant later, pure wizardly energy was sizzling across the complex, elegant curlicues of the spell diagram, turning them lightbulb-bright against the stones.

The inside of Darryl’s head was turning into a very busy place, full of chaos and noise. As he kept a close eye on his end of the spell diagram, he could feel his duplicate self doing the same. And he could sense the other members of the team, each mental signature vivid and alive and _different_ , as they set to work. It was an incredible amount of moving parts to keep track of, and it was giving him the distinct feeling of not being able to hear himself think. Over and through it all was the howling of the wind, and the gnawing blankness at the edges of his mind as the energy drain from the spell started to kick in. Darryl desperately wanted to take a moment to just breathe, but he knew it was a moment he didn’t have. He was holding himself together by sheer force of will at this point, and instinct told him that it was a matter of seconds—minutes at the very most—before everything he was holding at bay crashed in on him and overwhelmed him.

And then, without warning, one of the components of the whole maelstrom of sensory input was gone. His other self had blinked completely out of existence, leaving the island out to sea totally uninhabited. Darryl stumbled, trying to adjust to suddenly having only one set of senses to rely on. No sooner had he had time to notice the absence than his duplicate was back as though it had never left, the reassertion of normality more jarring than reassuring.

Under any other conditions, this would have been enough to make Darryl start heading towards panic. Losing control of one of his duplicates was unprecedented, and now was _not_ a good time for it to start happening. But the circumstances didn’t allow him time to dwell on it. While he was still trying to process what had just happened, the rest of the world grew warped and strangely muted, as though viewed through a foggy glass: unmistakable signs of the spell taking hold.

What followed was not so much of a presence as an absence: the massive wall of force and sound that was the approaching storm grew less intense by gradual degrees, the howl of wind scaling down to a whisper and the booming of thunder becoming a mild grumble. A moment later, rain began to fall, but it was a gentle, even downpour rather than the furious lashing that it could have been. Darryl distantly perceived his other self standing on the beach of the island, intact once again, watching the storm drift further out to sea.

Darryl let out a long breath and started walking, headed towards the lighthouse further down the beach, which was the intervention team’s designated meeting point. By the time he arrived, most of them were already there, a small flock of people clad in brightly colored raincoats. Most were chatting among themselves in small groups, some leaning on each other to deal with the energy they’d lost performing the spell.

Darryl stood awkwardly in place at the edge of it all, bouncing on his heels. All of the little groups seemed fairly closed off, and as much as he wanted to talk to everyone, he couldn’t see a way to just break into the circle. What was more, the inside of his head was still ringing from the aftereffects of the storm and the spell, and he didn’t feel nearly coherent enough to picture what he’d say to his fellow team members, even if he got the chance.

After a few moments of damp, prolonged silence, a couple of the nearest wizards noticed Darryl and waved, offering congratulations on a job well done in overlapping voices. Darryl waved back and mumbled something inarticulate that he hoped sounded vaguely positive, which was more or less the best he had to offer for the moment.

“Okay, listen up, everybody!” It was Madison’s voice, significantly louder than the other conversations, which all dwindled down into silence as the team members turned to look in her direction.

The team leader looked jubilant, in defiance of the rain still pouring down on her. “Ten minutes after implementation and everything’s holding steady—the storm’s right where we expected it to be, and all the numbers I’m getting are well within comfortable parameters. The worst of it should comfortably miss the coastline now, just like we planned. Well done, everybody. I’ll keep monitoring the local weather and send updates to all of you via manual, but in the meantime”—she made a shooing motion with one hand—“get out of here and go celebrate a job well done!”

After a hearty cheer, the members of the intervention team took Madison’s advice, dispersing in twos and threes and talking excitedly among themselves. The suddenness of it all surprised Darryl, somehow. After weeks of working together, planning and practicing the intervention, getting to know each other’s personalities and wizardly specialties, all at once it was just _over,_ and they were all going back to their own lives…

“Hey, great work out there today, Darryl!”

He turned, shaking himself out of his reverie, to see one of the other team members giving him a thumbs up, her normally vibrant red hair plastered to her face by wind and rain. “I don’t know if we could’ve pulled it off without you helping,” she told him.

“Thanks, you too,” Darryl replied, more or less on autopilot. His fellow wizard gave him a wide grin before activating a classic “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell and vanishing.

He could see a few other members of the team still walking along the beach, their raincoats isolated patches of bright color against the gray. But the color was not to last: one by one, his fellow wizards vanished, until Darryl was alone on the beach, now silent save for the constant pattering of the rain.

He kept trying to tell himself that he should be feeling happier. The intervention had been an unqualified success: everything had worked exactly as planned, and the storm wasn’t going to be ruining anyone’s day anytime soon.

But he couldn’t ignore the reality that his emotions were a lot more complicated than that. There was something quiet and sour hidden underneath the elation of a job well done, making the joy feel pale and faded. They had all been here together just moments before, working together, parts of a _team,_ and now all of that was gone as if it had never existed. And for a moment, Darryl was sure, he’d even felt his own extra self flickering out of existence.

A voice echoed in his head, unbidden: something Nita Callahan had said to him once, what felt like a million years ago. _Not being alone is the best part of being a wizard! Or just being a person._

Darryl turned and kicked the nearest rock as hard as he could, and did his best to pretend that the dampness around the corners of his eyes was nothing but a few stray raindrops.

After a few moments of looking out to sea and doing his best to breathe steadily, Darryl pulled out his WizPod and searched through its list of contacts for “Romeo, Carl.” To the casual observer—not that anyone was likely to be around in these conditions—he would have looked like nothing more than an ordinary kid making a phone call. Which he was, more or less, although “ordinary” was a tricky definition and the phone call was routed through the manual’s messaging functions.

“Hey, Carl. Huh? Oh, yeah, it went great. Um, if you have any free time coming up, I was wondering if I could meet with you. I think I could use some advice. Sure, yeah, that works. I’ll be there, thanks.”

He stood there, watching the rain falling on the waves, for a few moments more after ending the call, but the feelings chasing each other around the back of his head stubbornly refused to translate themselves into words. Anyway, he reflected, he might as well think it all over someplace a lot less cold and damp. His raincoat had long since ceased to be even remotely useful, and if he stuck around much longer, he was pretty sure he’d end up having to wring out his afro like a sponge. Darryl turned on the spot and vanished, leaving an empty beach behind him.

* * *

“Man, after all this I’m never going to complain about my homework again,” Darryl grumbled, scrunching up his face in concentration. “What are we even doing right now? Is this math or science or…?”

“A little of both at the same time, more or less,” Carl Romeo replied, leaning his elbows on the table and massaging his temples with a weary air. “With some theology and philosophy thrown in here and there, like you usually get with wizardry. All of which are collectively also known as ‘reasons I have a headache right now.’”

Darryl nodded in sympathy, feeling the dull pulse of his own growing headache as he did so. “Remind me again where we left off?”

The surface of the dining room table had almost completely vanished, covered in countless open volumes of Carl’s manual and glowing screens pulled from Darry’s WizPod, along with a mostly-empty Coke bottle or two. Darryl gave the whole mess a rueful look, trying without success to trace it all back to where they’d started.

His consultation had started out with what sounded like a fairly simple question—what had made his duplicate vanish, and how to keep it from happening again. But as so often tended to happen, the simple question had turned out to have endless, much more complicated questions hidden beneath its surface. Tom Swale, Carl’s wizardly partner and fellow Senior, had taken a quick look at what his manual had to say on the mechanics of bilocation and promptly given up, heading upstairs to work on something else and leaving Carl and Darryl to figure it out.

Although he’d been more persistent, Carl didn’t seem to have much more in the way of solid answers. The consultation Darryl had initially envisioned as an efficient half-hour affair had now eaten up well over an hour and a half, as Carl jumped from one complex and arcane potential explanation to the next (Darryl still wasn’t clear on what ‘shredding the interstitial structure of local spacetime’ meant, and by now he was afraid to ask). Try as Darryl might, he couldn’t see the light at the end of this particular tunnel.

He hadn’t even had the chance to ask any of his other questions—the ones that were less technical and more personal— _but maybe that’s just as well,_ he told himself. _Not even sure where I’d start with those._

Carl crumpled up the latest sheet of notebook paper he’d been scribbling on; with a flick of his wrist it flew over to the recycling bin and helpfully tossed itself in. “I may have lost track myself, honestly. I’m sorry, Darryl, but I just don’t know what to tell you. Your little bilocation trick is extremely rare, if not unique, and if we get too much further into troubleshooting the technical details I’ll have to start speaking exclusively in technical recensions of the Speech. Or refer you to an expert, and I don’t even know where in the galaxy I’d start looking for one.”

 He waved his hand again, and the many volumes of his manual started picking themselves up and reassembling into some semblance of order. “And you might need more than one expert, truthfully. I don’t know enough about either autism, _or_ the particular brand of wizardry that lets you double yourself like that, to have even a solid guess about how the two phenomena might interact. And then there’s the complicated dynamics of group spelling to consider, Powers only know how that might have affected things…”

Darryl frowned, noting the stress in Carl’s tone. “I hope I’m not…bothering you or anything, am I? I…um…I mean, this is really important to me, because it’s my other selves, but I know it’s taking way longer than we thought it was going to, I’m sorry….”

Carl waved away the apology. “Don’t worry about it. We’re Seniors; advising is a big part of the job description. What else do we have consulting hours for? And anyway, neither of us is actively on assignment right now, if you were wondering. Tom’s editing a magazine article, and I’ve got an appointment with a visitor from Alphecca tomorrow, but otherwise we’re both as free as the…”

The rest of his sentence was cut off by an almighty _CLUNK_ noise echoing from somewhere in the house, followed immediately by a sharp hissing that Darryl identified after a second as the sound of running water. “ _Carl!_ ” bellowed Tom’s voice, echoing from what sounded like roughly the same location as the rest of the noise.

“I just had to say something and tempt the Powers,” Carl muttered, wincing as he got to his feet. He shot a glance over at Darryl, who had also jumped to his feet and was standing in a battle-ready pose, scrolling through his WizPod in search of anything useful.

Darryl wasn’t generally the biggest fan of sudden loud noises, and his teeth were gritted against the continuing racket from upstairs, but one of the wizardly “apps” he had running in the background—which he’d downloaded after the storm—mitigated some of the effects of sensory overload. He added a basic personal shield to it and looked to Carl for cues.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Carl told him, already halfway up the stairs. “Just one of my little home-improvement projects gone slightly wrong, it sounds like. It’s my own mess to clean up; it’ll just take me a second.”

Darryl frowned. “Are you sure? I can help…”

“No question at all that you _can._ But you’re the guest here; there’s no need to drag you into helping with the housework.” Carl bounded up a few more steps, stopped, and turned back to Darryl. “But if you really want to lend a hand, you can maybe put a basic waterproofing spell on the ceiling here.” He fell silent for a moment, letting the continuing spraying-water noises fill the space. “You know, just in case.”

“ _CARL!_ ” Tom’s voice again, and significantly louder this time. “ _Wherefore art thou, Romeo?!_ ”

“ _Coming!_ Really sorry about this, Darryl, be back as soon as I can.” And with that, Carl was gone.

Darryl stared after him, bemused, for a moment or two, then got to work. He’d collaborated with S’reee on a few different wizardly projects recently, and teamwork with a humpback whale was close to impossible if you didn’t have the ability to quickly rattle off the words of a waterproofing spell, so he was well prepared for the task at hand.

It wasn’t long before he started to wonder if he’d finished the spell _too_ quickly. Once he’d double-checked that it was running properly (the lack of water dripping from the ceiling was a solid clue that it was), there was nothing left for him to do but wait, wonder what exactly was going on, and listen to the noises and muffled voices drifting down from the second floor.

So Darryl waited, and re-organized the apps on his WizPod for something to do, and scratched Tom and Carl’s sheepdog Annie behind the ears when she wandered through the dining room. By the time Tom and Carl returned, he’d been reduced to fiddling idly with a stray pencil left on the table and running through vocabulary terms of the Speech in his head.

Darryl heard the two Seniors coming back downstairs well before he saw them. The noise of running water had been replaced by the regular back-and-forth of their signature good-natured bickering, already in full force.

“…thought we’d both agreed that using wizardry for home repairs does more harm than good,” Tom was grumbling, though without much force behind the words.   
“It was a stopgap measure!” Carl protested. “Just to keep the shower working until the contractor gets here, and Powers only know how long _that’s_ going to take. Everyone in the profession runs on geological time, I swear. And anyway, I made it as secure as I could; there’s no way I could have known that the energy field from that Melvaran artifact you brought home was going to cancel it out somehow…”

“Which wouldn’t have been a problem,” Tom said, “if you would just remember that the Powers that Be, in Their wisdom, have given us common household repair supplies like duct tape and screwdrivers and wrenches for a _reason,_ and that maybe it isn’t always necessary to tamper with the fundamental operating conditions of the universe for the sake of household appliances…”

Darryl couldn’t help but be amused as he watched the pair of them arguing. It had the feeling of a well-worn tradition, both of them anticipating each other’s words and gestures and reacting almost automatically. Now that he thought about it, actually, it reminded him a lot of the playful arguments he’d seen Kit and Nita having before.

“Anyway, sorry to leave you hanging there, Darryl,” said Carl as he and Tom reached the bottom of the stairs. “The shower sort of…well…exploded a little bit, but we’ve got things handled by now.”

Carl’s loud floral-patterned shirt was rumpled but not noticeably damp, as was Tom’s more subdued polo shirt—the aftereffects of a personal waterproofing spell, Darryl recognized from his own recent work with S’reee.

“I hope you two have made some progress with the ‘power outage,’ Tom said. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help; I could really stand to do some more reading in that area. It’s all Greek to me right now.”

“Judging from what Darryl told me,” Carl said, “I’ve got a tentative guess that it might have had something to do with the intense nature of working in such a large group. It was the biggest intervention team you’ve ever been part of, right, Darryl?”

Darryl nodded. “And it was a really complicated wizardry, too. There was kind of a lot to keep track of...”

“That theory does make sense, then,” Tom said, pulling up a chair. “At its most basic level, wizardry is about intent, and you can’t have intent without a certain level of focus. The more wizards you add to a spell, the more complicated everything is, and the more there is to pay attention to. It can get to be a challenge to stay focused on what needs doing. It gets easier with practice, but it’s always wise to bear that in mind.”

“Yeah,” said Darryl, and then fell silent.

He stayed that way, fidgeting slightly in his chair, for a moment more. This, he could tell, was the tipping point: either he could let the conversation end here and just go home, or he could bring up the rest of his concerns, leaving the purely technical end of things behind and heading into less certain territory.

It was probably nothing important, really, and he had no idea if it was even something Tom and Carl could help with, but all the same…he sighed.

“That’s something else I was kind of worried about, actually,” he said, staring down at the dining room table. “Working with other wizards, and just…I don’t know, getting to know them…you’re right, it can be complicated sometimes.”

“It can be, no question,” Carl agreed. “I take it that’s something that’s been on your mind a good deal lately?”

“I guess it is, yeah.” There was another long pause while Darryl tried to find the right words.

“That’s not surprising,” said Tom into the silence, gently. “After all, you were trapped in your own head in a stalemate with the Lone Power for your first few months as a wizard; it makes sense that you’d be more used to working on your own. Cooperation with other wizards tends to be something best figured out through experience, with trial and error—but it’s never easy knowing where to start.”

“Yeah.” Darryl tried to keep his face more or less neutral—that wasn’t easy, either. “It’s just kind of, like…almost all the wizards I know have partners, or close friends, or people they work with a lot. Like you two, and Kit and Nita and Dairine and all their wizard friends…but I just…I don’t really know how to do that, how it even works. You’re right—I’m mostly just used to working with myself, and my copies. And that _works,_ but I don’t want it to be that way forever.”

Darryl was barely mumbling by this point, and still looking at the table a lot more than at Tom and Carl. He had no idea how much he was even getting across to them, but there was nothing for it but to keep going—he didn’t have much confidence in his ability to say all of this twice.

“And I mean, it’s not like…” he continued after a moment. “I’ve worked on interventions with people before, yeah, but as soon as the job’s done they usually just leave. It’s never been much more than a one-off. And you can’t really just walk up to someone and say, ‘hey, let’s be friends,’ can you? I was hoping I could meet some people during the wizardry in Vancouver, but that didn’t really work out, either. We worked together for a few weeks, sure, but I could barely even handle that.” He waved a hand at Carl’s manuals, still open to pages of technical information pertaining to his ‘power outage.’ “And once the spell was done…well, that was it, it was over. Like it never even happened in the first place.”

He shrugged and let out a long breath. “Maybe I just…can’t do this,” he mumbled, and fell silent.

“First of all, I’m glad you opened up about this,” said Carl, his tone of voice noticeably more low and quiet than usual. “You can’t have wizardry without truthful communication, after all, and that includes being honest with yourself. We’ll offer as much help as we can.”

“We might find ourselves with the opposite problem from the one you and Carl had before, though,” Tom added. “Nature can be relied on to follow its own rules most of the time, but people are a lot more complicated, and there’s no set of technical laws that can describe their behavior perfectly. This side of wizardry is a lot less scientific and a lot more abstract, generally speaking.”

“And don’t think it _isn’t_ wizardry, either,” Carl said. “The Art is all about having a conversation with the universe; some parts of it just talk back more obviously than others. A partnership works the same way: being willing to talk, and being willing to listen, is most of what you need.”

“I guess I…haven’t really had as much practice with that part,” Darryl admitted.

“And that’ll come, in time,” said Tom. “None of us are born experts on how to talk to other people. And there’s hardly one set of rules carven in stone for how to go about it. Every person, and every social interaction, is different from the next, and trying to act like ‘one size fits all’ usually does more harm than good. But the bright side of that is: you’re not doing it wrong, because there’s no one single way to do it _right._ ”

“And because of that, not all friendships can, or should, look the same,” Carl said. “There are wizards I only see every couple of years or so, but that doesn’t make them any less important to me than the people I work with every day.” He shrugged. “I like to think of it like a solar system. Some planetary bodies orbit closely around each other, whereas some comets only get close to anything else every couple of decades…or centuries. But they’re all part of the same system.”

“As for how to start talking to people in the first place…” Tom shrugged. “Honestly, there are worse options than just going with ‘I’d like to be friends; do you want to hang out sometime?’ or an equivalent. Like I said, nobody’s an expert at this kind of thing; some people are just better at pretending they are. And it’s usually better to try to say something, no matter how awkwardly, than to never say anything at all.”

“When it comes right down to it,” Carl said, “how something starts isn’t nearly as important as how it continues. You might get thrown together with anyone; it’s what you do _after_ that that matters.”

Darryl took this in, and found himself glancing back and forth between Tom and Carl as he did. The two of them had been picking up and continuing each other’s statements in an almost seamless exchange, as they so often did. All at once, the next question seemed obvious to him.

“So, uh…how did you guys end up being wizardly partners? If that’s not too personal, I mean.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “No, it’s not too personal. Most of the details would be in the manual anyway, if you looked it up—it all started, as these things often do, with an intervention. We can give you the high points.”

 “Tom, you want to start with this one?” Carl asked, glancing in his wizardly partner’s direction. “You’re the professional writer; you tell it better.”

“Maybe, but I need you to remind me what _really_ happened every now and then,” Tom said. “Feel free to chime in whenever I start drifting away from reality.”

He leaned back in his chair, getting a distant look in his eyes. “We actually met at college, upstate. Very first day of classes, basic Introduction to Communications course. I wanted to be a writer, Carl wanted to go into TV, so there we both were—just for pretty different reasons.”

“And you just started getting along with each other from there?” Darryl asked.

Tom buckled over slightly with a huff of surprised laughter. “Lord, no. We were already getting on each other’s nerves before the first round of ‘getting to know you’ questions was over. He thought I was an insufferable know-it-all, and I thought he was a dilettante who was just skimming the surface of the humanities because he had to, before moving on to the business world.”

“And anyway, we supported different sports teams,” Carl added wryly. “We’d both dealt with alien beings before in the service of the Art, but New Yorkers and Californians, well…”

“It wasn’t anything too serious, don’t worry,” Tom told Darryl. “In part, it’s a first-day-of-college thing—everything feels a hundred times more immediate and important than usual, and everyone’s got something to prove. Egos tend to run high.”

“Twenty minutes in, and we were already in some kind of competition to see who could answer the most questions the fastest,” said Carl, chuckling. “It sounds more than a little ridiculous looking back, I admit…”

“But then, as so often tends to happen, the Powers gave us Their equivalent of a meaningful nudge,” Tom put in.

“And, uh, what was that?” Darryl glanced back and forth between Tom and Carl, feeling fairly certain that he was more confused now than he’d been before they started.

Carl shrugged. “Oh, well, there was a massive explosion. So much for the first day of class—before we knew it, everyone was in the middle of evacuating the building.”

“More like stampeding, really,” said Tom. “Hardly any of the students were concerned with actually getting to safety—most of them just wanted a look at whatever was going on outside. And, well, we were both wizards; we were definitely in that second group. What seemed like half the school was standing around rubbernecking, and for a while, all I could see was the smoke rising over everyone’s heads. I fought my way to the front of the crowd as fast as I could.

“It was quite a sight. It’s a lovely old campus—I’m sure we have some pictures around somewhere of the way it looked then—huge old trees, brick and stone buildings covered in ivy, that sort of thing. Or, well, it usually was, but right then the whole central commons was on fire. And, well, you know the way you can just _tell_ when wizardly power has been exercised? That feeling was so strong there that it was completely impossible to ignore. Like someone shouting right in your ear.”

“The smoke was starting to clear,” Carl said, “enough for me to see a silhouette standing right smack in the middle of the blast radius. That’s when I knew that this was going to be an Incident; I didn’t even have to check my manual to know that my status had just switched to ‘On Assignment.’ More fires were catching, so the students were starting to clear out. I used a few basic spells to disguise what I was doing—plus lots of heatproofing, of course—and headed in at my first opportunity.”

“I’d been doing the same thing,” Tom said, grinning, “and…” He had to stop for a second as his words gave way to chuckling. Carl was laughing too, and the two of them shared a glance—the kind Darryl had often seen Kit and Nita exchanging, which seemed to convey whole volumes of information in a few seconds. That kind of nonverbal communication was one of the things Darryl had always wondered about when it came to wizardly partnerships—he could do the same thing with his duplicates, but that only made sense; after all, they would always know exactly what he was thinking.

“There we were,” Tom said once his laughing fit had died down, “standing on the edge of the crater together, both of us holding our manuals. We just froze for a second and stared at each other, never mind the fact that the campus was on fire. I knew we were both thinking the same thing—something on the lines of _that annoying kid from Intro to Communications is a fellow wizard? Are you kidding me?_ —and a second later, I realized that I could actually hear Carl thinking it in my head.”

“Then I told him something like _let’s not talk about it until we solve this whole mess,_ ” Carl said,“and that was enough for us to come to a basic understanding, I guess. We headed towards whatever had caused the whole impact…”

“And imagine our surprise when it turned out to be another human being, about our age,” Tom said. “She would’ve looked just like another fellow student, if she hadn’t been wearing something that looked like fancy astronaut gear. She was in her mid-twenties, looked to be of Indian descent, although under the circumstances I couldn’t confidently say if she was even born on Earth or not.”

“Timeslide,” Carl supplied in answer to Darryl’s puzzled expression. “Timeslide gone pretty badly wrong, obviously—she was pretty close-lipped about where and when she’d been intending to end up, but a crash-landing in the middle of a college campus in upstate New York in the late twentieth century was clearly _not_ on her itinerary. She wasn’t badly injured, but she was panicking—you would too, if you’d been turned into a human meteor without warning.”

“Carl and I worked out our plan of action pretty quickly,” Tom said. “I’m not sure if we were communicating directly mind-to-mind, or if we were just on the same page—it’s a surprisingly fuzzy line between the two for wizard partners, sometimes. We told her ‘we come in peace’ in the Speech and calmed her down the best we could, then moved over somewhere a little less out in the open—we were right in the middle of campus, after all; even with spells, there’s only so much you can do to keep people from noticing what’s going on.”

“She helped us put the fires out and repair some of the damage,” Carl said. “That’s one of the moments I remember best out of the whole fiasco. We were probably looking at wizardry being practiced in a way that hasn’t even been invented yet, on our end of things. It was quite something. Like watching someone weaving light out of thin air…”

“She didn’t stick around too long after that,” Tom said, “and she was clearly trying not to say too much for fear of causing temporal paradoxes, but she did a lot to help us put things back in order and figure out exactly what was going on. Really, you couldn’t have picked a nicer person to accidentally blow up half of our campus…”

 “And her visit ended up making the rest of the year a lot more interesting, too,” Carl added.

 “That’s an understatement,” said Tom drily, nudging Carl with an elbow. “Before she left, Carl found the time to ask her some questions. She wouldn’t tell him anything about the future, of course; there are about thirty different wizardly strictures against _that._ But he learned enough about how she’d got here, and about wizardry dealing with time in general, to start him on the path to his current illustrious career selling people pieces of Saturday.”

“For our whole freshman year I was something close to a triple major,” Carl said, chuckling. “Communications, Business, and Beginning Temporal Manipulation. Quite a full slate. But when you’re studying time travel, at least you’ve always got enough time to study everything.”

“I covered for him as best I could,” Tom said. “It took a while to finish repairing all the damage from the incident and making sure that the planet stayed _sevarfrith,_ but it helped that one of the faculty members turned out to be a wizard. And once the dust had settled, we put in all the paperwork to be roommates—since we were both wizards and were already starting to get along, it just seemed like it would be convenient.”

Carl grinned. “I’m sure having a time-traveling roommate was fun for you. Especially one who wasn’t very good at it yet…”

Tom rolled his eyes, though he was grinning too. “There’s just no easy way to explain to a professor that your roommate isn’t in class because he’s busy in the year 1732 at the moment. I usually just said something about ‘a scheduling conflict’ or ‘time management problems’—technically true, from a certain angle.”

“And then there was the time you had to rescue me from the nineteen-forties,” Carl said, chuckling. “That was an adventure.”

“Long story short, it was an interesting year,” Tom said. “That first day was just the beginning. We both had pretty demanding academic line-ups, I’d stay up all night with writing assignments sometimes, Carl was building homemade worldgates in our dorm room, and we both got called out on errantry on a pretty frequent basis. But we made it work, somehow, one day at a time.”

“And here we are now,” Carl said, shrugging. “Once we got into a pattern, we just never really stopped. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…”

“So that’s how it all happened?” Darryl asked, once Tom and Carl had fallen silent for long enough for him to assume that they’d reached the end of their story.

“How it started, anyway,” Carl said. “There’s been a lot since then—fights, milestones, negotiations, a senior Power in a bird suit, a threat to the fabric of the universe or two. We try to make a point of saying what needs saying, and listening to what needs listening to, and it’s worked out so far.”

“Huh. Wow, thanks, that was really interesting,” Darryl said, and meant it. He found himself replaying the whole story in his head, burning campus and time travel and all. Even laying aside how difficult it was to picture Tom and Carl as teenagers, it was a lot to take in.

“…but what was the point of it all?” Carl finished for him, smiling. “Well might you ask—we were rambling on for quite a while. Old habit. But I think there’s a point buried in there somewhere, if you know where to look.”

He shrugged and glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, as though searching for the right words. “When it comes right down to it, there’s no way to predict how and when you’ll meet someone who ends up being important in your life. There are so many factors at work, interconnecting and bouncing off of each other in unexpected ways—only the Powers can see where it’s all going in advance, I’d imagine. There you are, minding your own business one day, and then someone from the future falls from the sky and you realize your classmate is a wizard, and well, the rest is history. Or maybe you and the neighbor kid try to find a lost pen and end up in a dark version of Manhattan.” His smile widened. “Who knows what your story is going to be.”

“The point,” said Tom, taking over seamlessly from Carl’s sentence as he so often did, “is this: life is endlessly strange and full of surprises, and there’s no telling when it’ll sweep someone your way. It’s like being offered wizardry: there’s no way to predict it happening, but once the opportunity is there, how you respond is up to you. And in this case, as with everything else, the basic axioms of wizardry don’t stop applying. There are no coincidences, and whatever situation you find yourself in, it’s probably because you’re needed there. The only thing to do is to keep your eyes and ears open and do whatever you can.”

Tom looked like he was going to say more, but trailed off into silence, staring at a point somewhere over Darryl’s head. Turning around, Darryl saw a sphere of blue light hanging in the air and pulsing regularly—the “doorbell” that Tom and Carl had set up to notify them about visitors of a wizardly nature.

“Case in point,” said Tom, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Let me get that; I’ll be back in a second.” And then he was gone, headed in the direction of the back porch.

Carl stood up as well and stretched. “I hope we managed to answer at least a few of your questions, Darryl. As far as your bilocation problem goes, by all means keep an eye on it, but I get the feeling that it’s the same as the more personal aspects of group work: something that’ll get easier to manage, with time and practice.”

Darryl nodded. “Here’s hoping.” He’d told himself the same thing in the aftermath of the storm, before his consultation with Carl, when he’d been paging through the manual on his own in search of answers. But somehow, it wasn’t ringing hollow now as it had then. Somehow, everything felt just a little bit lighter, and he was enjoying the feeling too much to start questioning why.

“Carl,” said Tom, re-entering the kitchen, “There’s a whale in the backyard.”

Carl didn’t visibly react beyond raising his eyebrows. “Oh, come on, I didn’t flood the house _that_ much.”

“Debatable,” Tom replied, “but this one is here on business, I think.  She asked for Darryl.”

He gave Darryl a smile that had a knowing look to it, although exactly _what_ he knew, Darryl wasn’t sure. “Go on; she’s out back making small talk with the koi.”

The sight that greeted Darryl—a forty-foot humpback whale hovering in midair next to the koi pond like something out of a surreal dream, dappled patterns of sunlight through leaves shifting across her massive gray sides—would have been an arresting one by most people’s standards, but he was more than used to his colleague by now, and after all, he’d seen far stranger things in the practice of his Art. “Dai Stihó,” he said to S’reee. “What’s up?”

“Dai, D’haarryl; I hope you’ve been well. Nice work with that intervention with the storm in the North Atlantic last week, by the way; I saw the précis. That might have turned nasty if left unchecked.” S’reee flipped her tail up and down a few times, which Darryl had learned to recognize as a thinking gesture. “I don’t want to call you away from something important, but there’s another unfolding situation, and if you’re not busy, we could use your help…”

“Long story short is, there’s a great big volcano,” said a new, Irish-accented voice, and without further warning there was a third wizard standing in the yard: a lanky, shaggy-haired teenager dressed all in black in defiance of the warm weather. After a second of confusion, Darryl recognized him as Ronan Somebody, a friend of Kit and Nita’s he’d briefly met once or twice. “And it’s threatening to explode, as volcanoes tend to do, and it looks like it’s up to us to save the day. Technically it’s not your neighborhood and not your problem, but it _is_ S’reee’s neighborhood and uncomfortably close to mine, and she tells me you’ve been something of an expert at working underwater lately. Care to lend a hand? We’ll fill you in on the technical bits once we get there.”

Before he’d even really thought it through, Darryl found himself smiling widely and saying, “That sounds great.”

“We’d have asked Kit to pitch in, too, if he was around,” Ronan added as the three of them began laying out a transit circle, “but I hear he’s off-planet with Miss Neets again, saving some solar system or other. If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have said they couldn’t get any more inseparable, but they do so love proving me wrong.”

Darryl just smiled, did a last quick “spell check” on his portion of the circle, and added his wizardly signature next to S’reee’s and Ronan’s. The three names glowed together, bright against the dark of the grass, in the elegant curls of the language that had become at least as familiar to Darryl as English. An autistic kid from New York who worked magic with an MP3 player, an Irish teenage wizard, and a humpback whale visiting from the Atlantic Ocean: there they all were, their essences summed up in the same glowing, otherworldly script, three indispensable components of the spell.

_A solar system,_ Darryl thought, and something relaxed in the back of his mind, a tension he’d never quite had the words for. True, he still had a lot of unanswered questions about friendship and life in general, and what these two meant to him was still an undefined variable, but there they were together in the spell—and a spell always works.

He took a deep breath, then let it out again. Part of his mind was shouting at him not to reach too far and ruin everything, but before it could win him over he steeled himself and said, all in a rush, “Do you guys think you might want to, I don’t know, hang out or something after? Not for wizardry—just, you know, for fun.”

He could feel his heart hammering in his chest from the moment the words were out of his mouth, and he felt suddenly light and dizzy, as though gravity had decided it wasn’t in the mood to apply to him anymore. Fortunately, his companions didn’t leave him in suspense for long.

“Sounds like a plan to me!” said Ronan, grinning. “We’ll call it a reward for a job well done. Come to think of it, I’ve been meaning to take S’reee here to a proper concert in humanshape for ages.” He spread his arms theatrically. “Whalesong is all very well, I’m sure, but it’s just one genre; it’s _got_ to get old after a while! There’s a whole world out there that you’re missing out on!”

“That sounds…entertaining,” S’reee said, flipping her tail and giving Ronan a sidewise look. Darryl was no expert at reading expressions in general, much less cetacean ones, but he thought he saw an ironic glint in the whale’s eye. “Always assuming we survive the volcano, anyway.”

“You wound me! We’re all professionals here.” Ronan swept his eyes around the perimeter of the spell diagram and gave a satisfied nod. “Shall we?”

“Let’s go.” Darryl smiled and turned the spell loose.

Tom and Carl watched from the back porch as pre-teen, teenager, and whale abruptly vanished from the yard, heralded only by a quiet rushing noise as air filled the space they had vacated. “Something tells me,” Carl remarked, “that our consultation was a success.”

Tom nodded, the lines around his eyes crinkling with a subtle smile. After a moment he added, as though in an afterthought, “Which is more than can be said for your efforts at home improvement.”

“Come on, I’ve heard the sermon already. Let’s just cross our fingers that the contractors will actually show up when they’re supposed to for once. Entropy vanquished yet again.”

Tom still didn’t look entirely convinced, but he nodded. “We can hope.”

“We can always do that, at least,” Carl agreed. The two turned, by unspoken agreement, and headed back into the house, leaving the sun to slowly set on a balmy summer afternoon.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've written a fic involving Darryl. If there's anything I should improve, with regards to my portrayal of autism or of his character in general, please don't hesitate to let me know!
> 
> My thanks to everyone involved with the YW Christmas in July exchange; it's been immense fun being a part of it, as usual!


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